


the valkyrie rides again

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [6]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Billy Hargrove: Feral Cryptid, Canonical Child Abuse, Daemon Feels, Daemon Settling, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Maxine Mayfield: Feral in Training, Step-siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-15 22:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21025808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: Max would give anything just to be able to call him an asshole and slam the door in his face one more time.





	the valkyrie rides again

Max is certain there was time when they were not with her…but she no longer remembers that time. She’s always been a little ginger child, following around a tough-looking boy with a cougar for a daemon, from the moment she was a six-year-old girl in overalls barely tall enough to reach the table and he was the ten-year-old boy putting her shoes on before school.

She stares at the black dress waiting for her on her bed and knows she won’t follow that tough boy and his cougar anywhere anymore. Her brother had died in Eleven’s arms and Freyja, lovely Freyja with her husky purring voice, who called her ‘_Maxine’_ in a way that made her really love her own name, had turned to dust in her hands, nothing left of her but jewelry. A collar of gold plating with her name carved in runes, a long strand of looped gold and turquoise, the rings wrapped around her tail, and a few studs and hoops from her ears.

Max wishes now that she’d thought to gather them all up before they left the mall, before she had to leave Billy’s body, but she only held onto the strand of turquoise and gold. The collar with Freyja’s name on it had already been partially destroyed defending Max from the Mindflayer.

Still, it’s all she has left of her. All she has of either of them.

Steve totaled both the Toddfather and the Camaro that night, and she wants Billy to be buried with his saint’s medallion. Max has snuck as many of his records into her room as she could get away with and both of his jackets are stashed in her closet, but they aren’t as personal or irreplaceable as the jewelry and the Camaro.

She slips the black dress over her head, the gold and smooth polished turquoise stones resting upon her skin beneath it. When she looks into the mirror, Max has never seen anything more hateful.

Billy had been an angry mess, and he’d been an angry mess for as long as she’d known him. But Max would give anything to be able to call him an asshole and slam the door in his face just one more time.

On the dresser, Pallas has become a black cat with glowing yellow eyes. Quietly, Pal says “Max, if we don’t leave now, they’ll start it without us.”

Max shakes her head, despite her watering eyes. She sniffles. “Mrs. Byers wouldn’t let the priest start without me there.”

“She wouldn’t, but the undertaker won’t wait all day.” More quietly, he says, “We’ve got to let them rest, Max. We couldn’t do anything else for him, but we can at least give him that.”

Neil is sitting in front of a baseball game and her mother won’t look at her. Max makes a scoffing noise and Pallas leaps into her arms. She can’t even tell if what she feels is anger, sadness, or disgust. Maybe it’s all of those things. She stomps out the front door, letting the storm door slam shut behind her in her displeasure, only to stand frozen at the bottom of the front stairs, Pal still purring against her for comfort.

Steve is leaning up against the Beemer dressed in a black suit, complete with white flower tied with a black silk ribbon around Artie's neck. “Hey,” he says, with a small, sympathetic smile. “Ready to go?”

Her face crumples. “_No_!” she wails. “I’m not ready!”

He jogs up the walk to her, Pal leaping to land on Artie’s back as Steve embraces her. “I’m not even gonna pretend I know how this feels,” he whispers, letting her cry all over his nice suit. “Because I fucking don’t, Max. But I can promise that you won’t have do any part of it by yourself.”

“I k-k-know,” she sobs.

When Neil refused to pony up for anything more than a pauper's casket, Steve had handed her a gold American Express card with a hard expression and told her to pick whichever one she wanted. Mrs. Byers had walked her through selecting a church, surprised when Max passionately insisted that Billy would want a Catholic burial. When she became overwhelmed by the number of decisions she had to make, Jonathan quietly began taking over the major decisions, bringing Max in only for the personal touches. Nancy helped Max pick out Billy’s last clothes and handled all the flowers.

She appreciates all the help, large and small, but it doesn't change the fact that Max is the only one who cares that Billy is going to be lowered into the ground.

Everyone is already waiting by the time they arrive at the gravesite, all in black suits or dresses. Like Artie, each of the daemons wears a black silk ribbon with a white flower around its neck. Joyce is waiting with one for Max to put on Pallas, which she ties on despite being unable to feel her fingers. The reality of this moment has left her numb with horror.

Max wouldn't have been able to say what the priest said if she was paid a million dollars to repeat it. At the very end they were each given a white flower to place upon the coffin and it's not until the coffin is being lowered into the ground that the numb horror recedes, and aching loss comes rushing in to take its place. "Billy," she sobs, knees buckling. _"No,_ Billy."

She is blinded by her tears, but someone catches her before Max can end up falling in the dirt - Steve, she recognizes him by the smell of hairspray and the gentle brush of fluffy hair against her cheeks.

He doesn't tell her that it's going to be okay or that it will hurt less in time. Those things are true, but they're not true _now._

They walk back to the cars and Robin hands her a flat leather box. "Jonathan bought him the one he was buried with. I thought you might like one to keep for yourself."

Inside the box is a heavy golden coin.

** _William Michael Hargrove_ **

_August 16th, 1967 - July 4th, 1985_

On the reverse side is an engraved picture of a cougar's face.

** _Valfreyja of William_ **

Billy's daemon token. Max hadn't even thought of it until now - she was grateful that Jonathan had. Since a daemon's body turned to Dust when their human died, most people were burned or buried with some kind of token representing their beloved companion in life.

Robin had purchased a copy of Freyja's coin for her.

"Thank you, Rob," she said, dabbing her eyes with her sleeves.

"You're welcome, babe." She kissed her cheek and squeezed her hand before they got back in the car.

At the Byers, Max alternates between being unable to get any food down and eating three plates at a time.

She ends up squeezed onto an armchair with Steve and El, each girl still just small enough to perch on one of his thighs.

At their feet, Artemis lay like a mother dog with Pallas and Brigantia in her beagle form resting against her belly.

El has been quiet today – they should’ve had Hopper’s funeral yesterday, but she keeps having recurring dreams of him in the Upside Down and Joyce doesn’t have the heart to say that this is more likely to be a manifestation of her grief than some kind of proof of life. Joyce herself watched Andy dissolve into Dust.

Max has avoided asking, because El had the unique and awful experience of not only watching Billy die and holding him as his body gave up, but of _feeling_ him die in her mind. Max knows herself well – she knows she won’t be able to let the question go, and if she were to be given a pass on any day, it would be today. “El…how-how was he?”

“Afraid.” Eleven replies promptly, as though she’d been anticipating it. Who knows? She probably had.

“He was taken over by an alien shadow monster,” Will says gently. “There probably wasn’t room for him to feel anything else.”

“No,” she says, glancing at Max uncertainly. Her forehead wrinkles slightly, brows pinched. “He was always afraid. All the time.”

Max stares at her. She knows that look – it means that El is deliberately avoiding something. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Why is kissing a boy bad?” El asks, a seeming non sequitur that for her, never is. “I thought it was very nice.”

“It is…” Max agrees slowly. “What do you mean, El?”

“Billy thought about kissing a boy. He thought about it a lot,” El says, still with that pinched look to her brows. “But it made him feel angry and scared. Why?”

The loudest silence Max has ever heard fills the room, and she stares at El in complete shock. From her expression, it’s clear that Eleven has realized she just revealed an inappropriate level of information about Billy. On the couch, Will’s eyes have become the size of dinner plates, his cheeks losing their rosy liveliness.

Only Steve and Artemis notice how agitated Mithra has suddenly become and he meets Robin’s eyes from across the room. She looks hunted, tense, and he tries to convey ‘_We’re still okay_’ with only his eyes.

_At least_, El thinks desperately as Max stares at her in open mouthed surprised, _at least I didn’t say the boy was _Steve.

Even _she_ knew that would be giving too much away.

Beneath them, Steve himself has ceased all movement, as though by remaining perfectly still, the rest of the room will somehow forget his existence. El knows that what Billy thought about was _not_ a memory – the image was too vague. But it was something Billy had thought about a lot. Andy told her the right word for that was ‘wish’. Billy _wished_ to kiss Steve. And that wish had filled him with an angry, terrified sorrow.

“Neil would’ve _killed_ him,” Max finally whispers, the words croaked out of her dry throat. Her eyes are painfully wide, painfully blue. “_Literally_ killed him. The things he used to say…I thought he was just being cruel when he called Billy a f-”

She cuts herself off, putting a hand over her mouth as her eyes spill over. “He never told- he never said-”

“Okay. Okay, Max,” Steve mutters, gently dislodging El so that Max could settle in against him more comfortably and he strokes her hair, buying himself some time to think through what he’d like to say.

“Look…I know your brother and I didn’t really get along, but I do know that he cared about you, Max. Even if he had some real shitty ways of expressing it,” Steve says with a little grimace. “I’m not your big brother, but if I thought telling any of you a secret was going make you really upset, I wouldn’t tell you, either.”

“I wouldn’t’ve been upset,” Max mutters, wiping her eyes with her sleeve again. “I just wanted- He wasn’t _always_ shitty, you know.”

“I sort of assumed that,” he says mildly. “You wouldn’t love him this much if he were a total jackass all the time.”

“Can I tell you about him?” she asks timidly. She knows Billy wasn’t nice to anyone here, but she needs as least one other person to understand why she feels like a part of her has vanished.

"Of course you can."

Max opens her mouth and once the words start coming out, it’s a great flood of her love and loss that just keeps spilling out. She’s certain she’s not even making any sense, and there’s no order or reason to anything she’s saying. But once she starts talking she just can’t seem to stop.

The night Billy beat Steve’s face in, Max left the house with Freyja crouching over Billy's unconscious body. Her tail lashes unhappily from side to side as she gives Max an unbroken stare. “There is nothing I can do to make you stay,” she says. She was always formal, unless she was trying to cheer Max up. “But if you leave, I cannot protect you, Maxine.”

She didn’t know how to explain. “This is something I protect you from, this time.” Biting her lip, she adds “Please...just…?”

“I will make him calm,” Freyja agrees. “But you must return unharmed, Maxine. If they hurt you, I will have no desire to stop him.”

“I promise, Freyja.” 

Mom says that the tough boy with the cougar daemon is her brother now. Billy says he ain’t and shoves her into a hedge. He walks her to school Monday morning and doesn’t let go of her hand the whole time. He does it every morning after that.

She’s eight when the Miller brothers tell her she’s ugly and call her a carrot face and she runs home crying. Billy tells her to stop her wailing, but he stomps out of the house in a rage. The next day, Max finds out he knocked out one of Freddie’s teeth and put Kevin in a cast.

That same year, Max floods the bathtub by accident and wrecks half the bathroom. Billy calls her a fucking idiot and there’s a bruise on her arm where he grabs her and shoves her into her room. He locks Freyja in the room with her.

“Don’t do something stupid, William,” she says, and it’s the first time Max had ever seen her upset, no matter how angry Billy seemed to get.

“How could you even tell, Valfreyja?” he replies, and slams the door shut. Max goes to sleep with Freyja laying on the covers. She purrs the whole night and in the morning, Billy’s got a black eye and he tells her to shut the fuck up when she asks him where he got it.

That’s Billy's usual response to any question he doesn’t like. “_Shut the fuck up, Maxine._”

Freyja will whisper something afterward, something to make her laugh. “Don’t listen to him, it’s his time of the month.”

Or “He’ll feel better when he isn’t getting his ass kicked by the hangover.”

Or “How loud do you think he’ll yell if I bite him in the ass?”

When they move to Indiana, Billy is angry all the time. So angry that Max starts to worry that he’s lost his mind. It’s terrifying – she’s never really been afraid of Billy up till then, but he’s losing it fast. Her only consolation is that Freyja is still there and she’s still okay. “Why is he so _mean_?” she sobs in her room, the cougar watching over her with her golden eyes. “How can you be so nice even when he’s so _mean_?”

Freyja grooms Pallas, resting between her paws as a young tabby cat, licking him clean with her long raspy tongue. “Daemons still remember things even when their human forgets them, Maxine,” she says in her low throaty purr. “Billy has forgotten kindness, and that makes him angry a lot of the time.”

“But _you_ still remember,” she says desperately. “Can’t you teach him again?”

She was silent for so long that Max worried for the first time that she’d tattled on her to Billy. “Oh, Maxine, I wish that I could,” Freyja replies sincerely. “But I can’t teach him something when Billy’s trying hard to forget it. When the time is right, I’ll do everything I can to remind him. Until that day comes, I _can_ promise that he loves you no matter how angry you think he is, and as long as I still remember, Billy can learn it again.”

Billy buys her a skateboard and some knee-pads for Christmas the year before they move. She bombs constantly the first couple of weeks and Billy puts bandages on her elbows and when he puts them on, says “Here comes Mad Max” and the nickname sticks. She pretends to get pissed at him every time he ruffles her hair. He threatens to make her skate home whenever she stays out after dark, but he never does.

He’s the one who teaches Max to swim, walking her into ocean waves that swell up to her chin while Billy holds her hand. “Billy, I’m scared!”

“Nothing to be scared of, Maxie. Just don’t let go, okay?”

“Okay.”

Floating with him on a surfboard out in the middle of the Pacific, watching a group of dolphins pass by, Pallas imitating them with glee as the California sun blazes on the waves. And there was Billy, hugging her from behind. “See?” he whispers. “Wasn’t that worth it?”

Last month, he took her to the mall and a guy in the bookstore started talking to her and he seemed pretty nice until he asked Max how old she was. “Oh, I’m fourteen. I’ll be a freshman in September.”

And the dude looks her up and down in this weird way and says, “There’s no way you’re fourteen.”

Staring at him like a moron, Max says “Well, I am. Fourteen.”

And her stomach lurches when he says “With a body like that, baby? No way you’re fourteen. Let me-”

“I would leave,” Billy hisses in his ear, appearing from behind him like a cigarette-scented shadow and grabbing his arm and shoulder so hard the dude winces. “Now. Quickly. Because my sister _is_ fourteen, and if you finish plan to finish that fucking sentence, she can watch me kill a guy before she turns fifteen.”

For added zest, Freyja makes that awful hissing cobra sound, ears flattened back and fangs bared at his gecko daemon. Max is pretty sure he peed himself a little trying to run out of the bookstore.

Her dad forgets her tenth birthday (and her ninth, and her eighth), so Max just stays home and cries in bed. She doesn’t wanna do anything. Her birthday is in February, so Billy buys one of those heart-shaped boxes from the grocery store. He drags her from the bed by her feet and replaces the name in ‘Roxanne’ with ‘Maxine’. He can carry a tune, but he sings it off key on purpose because he knows it will make her laugh.

He takes her to the beach a lot. Summer is the best time, the time when Billy seems the happiest. They go before breakfast, all afternoon, even at midnight.

At midnight Billy smokes one of these weird cigarettes that smell terrible, but he gets super relaxed every time he has one. On the beach, he smokes one and lays down in the sand and when Max gets tired of sitting on shores and making sandcastles, she curls up beside him, half-asleep.

Billy wraps an arm around her and tells Max that there are pictures in the stars, and he teaches her to see them, tells her about all their stories. He tells her about the vain queen who endangered her daughter’s life, about the hunter and his dogs, and about the giraffe called Camelopardalis.

Max remembers sitting beside him in the Camaro, going twenty miles over the speed limit and hitting all of the good hills on the down slopes so that her stomach drops on every hill. Billy howls along with ‘Born to Be Wild’ and she laughs the whole way.

Freyja was a near-constant companion, especially inside the house, but Max never touches her with her bare hands, not even once. It’s the only rule Billy really has for her. Every other rule he gives her is pretty much subject to his emotional whims and mood swings, but that’s the one rule he does not ever budge on. Freyja is off-limits, and not just to Max, to _everyone_.

Freyja is his, and Pallas is hers, and Billy does not ever offer to touch or hold him. Max takes to keeping a pair of knit gloves in her jeans and in Indiana, it’s not even that weird.

Before this year, the most memorable 4th of July was back in California when Billy got high and gave her The Talk.

Neil and Susan went away to Hawaii that year. All throughout the neighborhood, fireworks went off and the smell of charcoal and lighter fluid filled the air.

And there was Billy, laying stark fucking naked in the kiddie pool in the backyard. “WHY AREN’T YOU WEARING CLOTHES?”

“Maxie,” he informs her with a loud hyena cackle. “I am the _stonededest_ I have ever been in my life.”

“Were you raised by wolves?!”

“No,” he replies, head lolling lazy toward her with a foggy grin. “By that nasty Doberman bitch. Are you embarrassed, Maxie? Never seen a naked boy?”

“You know I haven’t!” she cries, outraged. “Put some damn clothes on! Billy, what if someone calls the cops on you?!”

Billy does not put some clothes on. Instead, Billy gives her The Talk while high as a kite and naked in the kiddie pool. He tells her what to do if she wants to get a boy’s attention. What she should do if she wants to kiss him, what to do if she _doesn’t_. What to do if the boy won’t take no for an answer.

“…and then you grab his balls, dig your fingernails in, and twist as hard as you can. He’s gonna scream – keep twisting, Maxine, twist until he’s on the ground. If he cries or throws up, you’ve done it right. Then run your ass outta there and come find me, so I can break every bone in his body.”

She never does figure out why, but Neil throws Billy out of the house just after he gets the Camaro. Being in the house without Billy and Freyja there makes Max nervous in a way she can’t quite put her finger on. On edge.

Almost as though he can read her thoughts, there’s a tapping on her window that night and when Max lifts the sash, they’re standing beneath her windowsill. Billy’s hair is wet, and he’s got a black eye and a split lip. He smells like the stinky cigarettes. “C’mon, Maxine,” he whispers, darting a furtive glance at their parents’ bedroom. “Hey, Pal. We’re gonna go for a ride.”

“Where are we going?” Pallas asks, but he’s already climbing out the window.

“We’re gonna take a little vacation,” Billy mutters. “Grab some extra clothes, Max.”

Max doesn’t question how long they’ll be gone. She doesn’t even demand to know where they’re actually going. Just follows that tough boy and his cougar and trusts him to lead her safely onward.

He drives them up the coast and they end up in Sequoia National Forest. They sleep in the car beneath the enormous trees, and Billy sings her every Johnny Cash song he knows.

‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ is so good, she cries into his shoulder and Billy pets her hair.

She doesn’t even care if they go home again. But after three days of eating in diners and sleeping on top of him in the back seat, Billy tells her that they have to go back to Santa Monica.

Her mother never even asks where they’ve been. It’s like she didn’t even notice Max was gone.

“And he was such an _asshole_ to _everyone_!” she whispers, sobbing furiously. “And he said that he was _sorry_. But I don’t want him to be _SORRY_. I want him to be _here_!”

Steve has no response to that, just holds on and lets her cry. Because Billy _was_ an asshole, but it’s clear to him now that for Max, he’d tried his best. Even when his best was fucking awful, he tried so hard to be what she needed. When he couldn’t manage that, Freyja had taken over.

Will lets out a squeak of surprise as his mother hugs him tight, squeezes him fiercely with all of her meager strength. “Mom, what-?”

Cupping Nanna in his palms, Sindri murmurs “We’ll tell you later, baby. Later.”

Max doesn’t seem to realize how much of Billy’s life she’d just given away, but Joyce knows how you make an angry child who’s forgotten kindness. A child with a father who calls him a horrible name and who curses at Max when she asks how he got that black eye.

It’s been a while since she was this viscerally glad she’d gotten her sons away from Lonnie, but the feeling hasn’t diminished in intensity with time.

Artemis watches as Pallas became a golden cat with large tufted black ears and a short tail, only a little smaller than herself. “Did you try to become a cougar?” she asks quietly. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Pal.”

“I couldn’t make it stick,” he says, ears folding back. He kneads his paws into her fur slightly before settling down. “It didn’t feel right.”

“How does this feel?”

Pallas glances up at Max for a moment. His eyes are greenish gold and for the first time in two weeks, a tiny glow of happiness ignites in her. “It feels…permanent.”

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons mentioned here:  
Andraste "Andy" - Hopper's daemon, a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Means 'invincible, unconquerable'.  
Artemis "Artie" - Steve's daemon, a blue merle Australian Shepherd. Means 'safe and sound'.  
Brigantia - Eleven's daemon, unsettled. Means 'the exalted one', even 'strength, force'.  
Mithra - Robin's daemon, a spectacled flying fox. Means 'oath, contract', even 'friendship'.  
Nanna - Will's daemon, a death's head hawkmoth. Means 'brave, daring'.  
Pallas "Pal" - Max's daemon, a caracal. Means 'to brandish a weapon'. This was a title of the Greek goddess Athena (Pallas Athena), who ruled over wisdom and warfare and sprang to life fully formed from the body of Zeus.  
Sindri - Joyce's daemon, a diademed shifaka. Means 'sparkling'.  
Valfreyja "Freyja" - Billy's daemon, a cougar. Means 'lady of the slain (in battle)'.


End file.
